Global backlash against climate policies has begun

 Around the world, a growing backlash against pro-climate policies is emerging, fueled by skepticism, political polarization, and concerns about the economic and social costs of transitioning to a low-carbon future. The Economist has assessed how the opposition to climate action is increasingly becoming a challenge in curbing global carbon emissions, especially as populist politicians exploit these concerns to undermine effective climate policies. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

"We need to be good stewards of our planet. But that doesn’t mean I need to do away with my gas vehicle and drive an electric vehicle with a battery from China', said Kristina Karamo, the chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, on September 22nd. America’s Democrats, she warned, are trying to 'convince us that if we don’t centralise power in the government, the planet is gonna die. That seems like one of the biggest scams since Darwinian evolution'.

It would be tempting to dismiss Ms Karamo as an irrelevant crank, but she is not irrelevant. She represents an extreme wing of a movement that is gathering pace around the world: a backlash against pro-climate policies. One of its more familiar cheerleaders could be America’s next president. On September 27th Donald Trump said: 'You can be loyal to American labour or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics but you can’t really be loyal to both…Crooked Joe Biden is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy our country itself'.

On September 20th Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, announced a weakening of net-zero targets, including a five-year delay of a ban on the sale of new petrol cars. Two weeks earlier, Germany kicked a mandate to install green heating in new homes years into the future. France has seen huge protests against high fuel prices, and could one day elect as president Marine Le Pen, who deplores wind farms and thinks the energy transition should be 'much slower'. In America climate change has become a culture-war battleground: at a recent debate for Republican presidential candidates, only one admitted that man-made climate change is real.

How serious an obstacle is all this to curbing global carbon emissions? Michael Jacobs of the University of Sheffield in Britain sees reasons for cautious optimism. The world’s biggest emitter, China, understands the need to decarbonise and is investing massively in solar and wind. The second-biggest emitter, America, has taken a green turn under Mr Biden. Brazil has sacked a rainforest-slashing president; Australia has ditched a coal-coddling prime minister. Nearly a quarter of emissions are now subject to carbon pricing. And the pace of innovation is impressive. Two years ago the International Energy Agency, a global body, estimated that nearly 50% of the emissions reductions needed to reach net zero by 2050 would come from technologies that were not yet commercially available. In September it said that number had fallen to 35%.

The political undercurrents are less reassuring. Voters are realising that remaking the entire global economy will be disruptive. Some—a minority—dispute that man-made climate change is under way. Others object to certain policies deployed to tackle it, because they impose costs on ordinary citizens, or add hassles to their overstretched daily lives. Some, particularly the elderly, do not like change at all, especially when it means fuss today in return for benefits they may not live to see. Even among those who accept that action is needed, views differ as to who should shoulder the burden. Many would prefer it to fall on someone else.

Awareness of the dangers of climate change seems to have risen over the past wildfire-charred decade. In polls of 12 rich countries by Pew, an American think-tank, the share of respondents who said it was a 'major threat' rose in every country except South Korea, where it was already high. Clear majorities everywhere bar Israel agreed with this description. Yet this does not mean they are willing to pay more taxes to help prevent climate change. In a survey of 29 countries by Ipsos, a pollster, only 30% of respondents said they would be willing to cough up.

Crowding out

Perhaps most alarmingly, a partisan gap has opened even on scientific questions. In all of the 14 rich countries surveyed by Pew in 2022, people on the political right were less likely to see climate change as a major threat than those on the left. In Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden the gap was very large: between 22 and 44 percentage points. In America it was a gobsmacking 63 points. And a new poll by YouGov for The Economist found that whereas 87% of Biden voters believed that climate change was caused by human activity, only 21% of Trump voters agreed.

In democracies such divisions have consequences. [Public opinion matters in dictatorships, too, but that is beyond the scope of this article.] In rich democracies, especially, divisions over climate are aggravated by populist politicians, who take real problems [such as cost and disruption] and exaggerate them, while claiming that the elite who impose green policies don’t care about ordinary motorists because they cycle to work.

Populism tends to undermine effective climate policy in several ways. First, populists are often sceptical of experts. When people say 'trust the experts', suggests Ms Karamo, they really mean: 'You are too stupid to make decisions about your life'.

Second, populists are suspicious of global institutions and foreigners. 'Every subsidy we award to an electric-vehicle manufacturer is really a subsidy to the Chinese Communist Party, because we depend on them, like a noose around our neck, for the batteries', says Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate. Such attitudes are bad for climate mitigation, argues Dan Fiorino of the American University in Washington, DC, because 'climate policy is as much a matter of foreign relations as it is of economic policy' ".